She rises onto her toes.
Dancer's instinct.
And kisses me.
Soft.
Gentle.
Nothing like the violence we're both capable of.
Her lips are warm against mine—tentative at first, exploring, like she's testing the waters. There's no urgency in it. No demand. Just... connection. The simple press of mouth to mouth, the sharing of breath and space and something that feels terrifyingly like intimacy.
When she pulls back, her eyes are bright.
Vulnerable.
Real.
"All of this is really new," she admits, voice quiet. "And scary. I don't want to make any mistakes. Don't want to do something wrong and mess up the only good thing that's happened to me in years."
The only good thing.
She means us.
She means this pack, this impossible arrangement, this alliance that stopped being just strategy somewhere along the way.
"But," she continues, and now there's a spark of mischief returning to her expression, "if you want to fuck like wild monkeys, we most certainly can."
The whiplash fromvulnerable confessiontosexual invitationmakes my head spin.
That's her, I realize.
That's who she is.
Chaos and tenderness and violence and softness, all wrapped up in a package that doesn't make sense but somehow works perfectly.
"Be more bold about it, though," she adds, finger poking my chest. "Or Sage is going to have all the fun."
A wink.
Teasing.
Challenging.
She bends down to retrieve her blades—the motion displaying the curve of her ass beneath my too-large shirt—and scoops up Sage's discarded garment as well.
"I'm keeping these, by the way," she announces, holding up the fabric. "Both of them. I'm going to build a nest."
A nest.
Omega behavior.
The instinct to surround yourself with the scents of your pack, to create a space that feels safe and claimed and irrevocably yours.
She's building a nest.
With our clothes.
